Category Archives: Future of Seed

Wow, what a response we’ve had to the consultation process – over 1,500 of you crazy cats participated in some way. This is really a fantastic response, and the restructure committee is incredibly grateful for everyone’s input. This puts the effort in communal effort!

We now have a really solid dataset to begin designing an entity that will serve the needs of this community, both now and into the future.

The restructure committee, Town Council, and Red Earth City directors will spend the next few months considering the outcomes of the consultation. This analysis will support a final report on the the consultation. The report itself will make recommendations on the preferred legal entity, constitution, board composition, and membership (plus a couple of other items).

The final report will be presented at Seed, so please look out for that. More info will be posted closer to the time.
As usual, if you have anything else you want to say, or if you have any questions, please send them to futureofseed@burningseed.com. Updates will continue to be posted on our Future of Seed Page, on the Burning Seed Facebook page, or sign up to our Email List.

Ok, we’re pretty excited for this one – it’s the questionnaire for the restructure process!

The questionnaire contains several questions (obviously) that will be key to how the new entity operates. These are relevant to the actual legal structure that we adopt, as well as what the new constitution will contain. It’s important stuff.

This questionnaire has been developed based on the feedback we have received to date. It has gone through a refinement and testing process over several weeks.

If you would like to be kept up to date on future consultations, town halls and receive details on the final report, please sign up to our Future of Seed Email List here. Any queries, comments or concerns? please email futureofseed@burningseed.com.

Lastly, we have a few in person consultations happening in Newcastle April 22nd, Matong/Riverina on May 6th, and online for folks in other regions early May (for more details on the online session email futureofseed@burningseed.com).

One of the key pieces of feedback that we have heard as part of the restructure process is that people feel that they need more information about what they are being asked when we talk about what the future of Burning Seed looks like.

In response, the restructure committee has developed some documentation that we hope will be of assistance over the remainder of this process.

We’d like to share three documents with you;

A spreadsheet that highlights the differences between each of the legal models we are considering.

A research paper that discusses how other regional burns are structured.

A PDF that provides a bit of background and history on the creation of the Burning Seed Event and the corporate structure of Red Earth City.

A reminder as well that we are currently seeking written submissions via an online form. Prefer to talk with us in person? We are hosting additional face-to-face sessions in Melbourne (8-Apr-18), Sydney (15-Apr-18 TBC), Newcastle (22-Apr-18 TBC), Brisbane (29-Apr-18 TBC), and Riverina/Matong (6-May-18 TBC) and launching an online questionnaire in April.

As always we’ll update our Future of Seed Web Page with up to date information, links and you can also sign up to our very low traffic email list.

Thanks everyone, we look forward to hearing more from you as we move through the community engagement process.

Thanks to everyone who attended the two consultation sessions in Melbourne and Sydney, held at the end of November 2017, as part of the Burning Seed restructure process. It was really great to hear everyone’s views on the future of the Burning Seed organisation, and their key concerns for the new entity.

We wanted to take a moment to briefly summarise what we have heard so far; this is included below. Before we do, we just wanted to highlight a couple of things. First, as everyone in the community commits to engaging in this process we learn from each other and we will continue to incorporate key learnings into the process evolving as we go. We are also pleased to share a Statement of Intent from the Red Earth City Directors that outlines their hopes and commitment to this process, you can read that here. Lastly, if you want to find out more about the people behind the names doing the work to deliver this process please check out the bios for the Restructure Sub-Committee and the Town Council with bios coming soon from the REC Directors.

And now back to the summary …

Town Hall: What did we hear?

We had some really helpful feedback, and would like to share with you some of the main points.

First, it was very clear that the Seed community want transparency in the new entity. This was a very strong theme emerging from the consultation process, and several people provided very useful insights here. At the same time, there was recognition that the precise way in which this occurs still needs to be thought through. We will look to continuing the conversation about transparency through the remaining consultations.

Burners would also like to see consultation on key issues facing the new entity. These were described by some as relating to ‘big ticket’ items, including moving the site, and major financial decisions. Again, this issue is something we can tease out over the remaining consultations.

We also heard that some people would like more background information on the kinds of entities that are available, and the pros and cons of each. We are currently finalising some documentation that outlines local options, and we will release it once all the information has been cross-verified as accurate.

Appointment of directors to the new entity was also discussed at the sessions. Several people suggested that there should be a nomination process that was transparent and accountable to the community.

What happens from here?

This feedback will be used to inform the kinds of questions we will ask at the future consultation sessions. It will also support the analysis and discussion contained in the final report, which is currently scheduled to be released around July 2018.

We would also like to inform everyone that the restructure committee has reviewed the current timelines in response to community feedback. We have now expanded the process to (a) make it longer; and (b) include more face-to-face consultation sessions. Given this, additional consultations will happen over March and April 2018 in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Newcastle, and the Riverina/Matong area. We will also hold an online session (pending interest and availability).

An online questionnaire will also be released around March/April 2018, so please look out for that. In addition, we are now accepting written submissions via this form.

As we continue to engage with the community about the future of Burning Seed, we wanted to remind you of the upcoming Community Consultation meeting happening in Sydney on Thursday November 30th 2017. The meeting will run from 7pm for a 7:30 start at The Leela Centre, 2nd Floor, 113-115 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst NSW. https://www.facebook.com/events/312731982469211/

This session will be highly interactive and led by the facilitator Baron de Merxhausen, who will have you working in small groups and diving deep into conversations. Some of the topics up for discussion may include how you want to be consulted in the future; how directors should be appointed; and who should be a member. Please join us!

If you can’t make it, there will be more opportunities in the future to provide your feedback. This includes an online questionnaire and a written submission. We may also run another Sydney community consultation if we have strong demand (we are mindful many folks can't make this one due to Subsonic festival and other commitments).

Did you venture into the Deeper Space of community with us at Burning Seed this year? If so thank you for showing up to Town Hall and contributing your thoughts to the process. If you missed it and want a recap you can check out the notes here.

We also wanted to share more about this process and the team with you. Creating a Community Engagement Process that will allow for many levels of contribution isn’t an easy task but we’ve been lucky to find several community members willing to attend at least two and sometimes four meetings a month that are at least two hours long if not more, spend many hours researching organisational structures, document many processes and develop project plans. Together the Restructure Committee have a diverse background of skills from leading community engagement processes like this for other groups and government organisations to being some of the core team members that help create Burning Seed, you can read more about the members here.

Every committee needs guidelines and the Restructure Committee is no different. You can check out our Terms of Reference here that outline the scope or the work we’re doing and read the blog post outlining our duties here.

Lastly, don’t forget that we have two more open consultations coming up in Melbourne and Sydney, please RSVP on the Facebook events for;